Planted by Iris Jensen
He walked along the fence line early one September morning, dew and raindrops clinging to the grass and jumping off his boots with each of his steps. He was looking for a short in the fence—the calves had gotten out for the third time this week. The first time, the gate by the garden had been left open. The second time, the electric fence had been tangled with the barbed wire—way up on the North Eighty—and he’d had to walk three miles in the rain to find it. That was when he went to the grave. But he wouldn’t do that again, not now.
The fog lingered on the horizon as he made his way past the barn, through the windbreak, and to the fence. The original fence had been barbed wire, and it was as old as he was—barely standing between decaying posts. The field had been in hay for some forty years, and in that time the fence line had grown into something unrecognizable: trees and bushes slowly intertwining, creating a tapestry of posts and wire, and the fence quietly disappearing.
He’d refused to put up an entire new fence when he needed to use the field as pasture again. He knew the neighbors wouldn’t help him, and he had things to do other than ripping up trees. So he’d kept the old fence and strung an electrical wire where it had once stood. It worked fine, except when the wind blew. Then, the electrical wire would wrap around one of the stray strands of barbed wire, killing the whole fence like it had last night. That was why he had to walk.
He was past the marsh by the time he found the short. He had started to pay more attention to his memories than the fence, but when he heard the snapping of electricity running through metal, he quickly put everything else out of his mind. It only took a few more strides until he could see the electric wire tangled around the barbed wire, so tightly wrapped that he couldn’t even tell where the wrapping had started.
He untangled the wires with the broken end of a fence post he found in the pasture, maneuvering between barbs until the fence finally jumped free. He stepped forward, grabbing the re-electrified fence between his thumb and first finger, and he held tight until he felt the first pulse of electricity jolt through his body. He nodded. Pulling his hat off, he ran a rough hand through his thinning hair before starting his return to the house. He snugged the hat back onto his head as he walked along the cattle trail.
As he made his way past the barn, he could smell woodsmoke from the house. He’d started a fire before he left this morning, but if it was still going Debra must have added some wood when she woke up. It was kindling fire time of year; not quite time for fires in the evening, just little ones in the morning to take the chill out of the air. He watched the smoke disappear from the chimney, becoming part of the fog.
Debra was on the couch when he came in the door. She held a mug in her hand and had a book on her lap, but she was staring out the window, her glasses pushed up onto her head. He paused slightly, then turned back to the door and shrugged off his soaking jacket.
“Where were you?” she asked, turning to face him.
He bent down, bracing himself against the wall and tugging off his wet boots. “Fence was out.”
She nodded slowly, turning back to the window as he padded down the hallway, his sogging socks leaving marks on the carpet.
He went to the kitchen and poured himself a mug of black coffee before returning to the front room and settling himself in his chair. She hadn’t moved when he got back. It wasn’t until he looked over again that he noticed her face.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” he said.
She shook her head. “Nothing happened.”
He already knew. “I didn’t.”
She nodded slowly, looking at her mug and back up at him. He tried to meet her eyes.
“I didn’t,” he repeated, conviction in his voice. He wanted her to believe him.
“Okay,” she finally said, turning away from him again.
“We have to have an answer for them by Thursday,” she said, looking out the window.
“I know that, Deb,” he responded, shaking his head. “Believe me, I know. What I don’t know is how you think we’re going to come to an agreement by then.”
She set her mug on the coffee table and shrugged so sharply that he wondered if she had hurt her neck.
“I don’t know what I am supposed to say to you,” he whispered. He was too tired to raise his voice. “I don’t know how you expect me to change my mind. It’s not like you’re asking me to leave a box of sweaters in the attic. It’s our son.”
“He’s dead.”
Debra said it with so little expression that for less than a split second he wondered if this could even be the same woman that he’d known so many years ago, when they lost Daniel and their nightmare began.
He braced himself as she opened her mouth and continued. “Sitting by his grave doesn’t bring him back. The only thing sitting by his grave does is keep you from moving on.”
“It’s called remembering him, Deb. What else am I supposed to do?”
Debra shook her head as she opened her mouth again. “He’s dead. Your son is dead. You’re supposed to move on.”
“Move on? What, like you did when you threw all his things away without a second thought? And why does he always turn into my son when we have this conversation? He is our son. Our son. He was our son when he was born; he was our son when we buried him. Pretending he’s not our son now doesn’t make him go away.”
Since they got the offer for the farm, they’d had the same conversation nearly every day, but this was the first time that either of them had gone so far. He knew that somewhere, deep down, she cared for their boy, but he just couldn’t understand how anymore. Now, with the deadline approaching, his frustration bubbled to the surface. He saw her jaw tighten, and she ran a hand through her hair, pulling when she reached her bun.
“I didn’t want to start the morning like this,” she said, sitting back and closing her eyes.
“Neither did I.” He could barely get his words out.
“You’re the one that went to the grave again,” she said sharply as she stood from the couch and walked towards the kitchen.
“You know that I didn’t,” he started, but she didn’t hear him. She had already walked away.
He got up from his chair too, but he didn’t follow her.
“I have to go into town today,” he called out, “to pick up that part for the tractor.”
She didn’t respond.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
He slipped back into his sogging boots and headed out the door.
The part for the tractor wasn’t supposed to be in until this afternoon, but he walked to the truck anyway. There were only a certain number of times he could stand having this conversation with Deb. What was the line he’d heard? “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Insanity was all the house had felt like since they got the offer for the farm. Even if he just went for a drive, he needed to get away.
He used the back of his sleeve to brush the dew from the window of his 1998 Chevy and sat behind the dash. The radio turned on when he twisted the key, but he lowered its volume. His head was already too full.
Of course, he had thought about Danny in the years since the accident. He thought about him every day. The offer on the farm—the thought of losing the only part of his son he had left. It made him feel like Danny had died a year ago. When he thought of Danny now, it wasn’t the joyful memories of his son that had filtered out as years went by. Instead, the mud had all been stirred up, and he only saw the worst moments of the worst part of his life. Danny crying, then stopping, and never crying again. Debra crying, then stopping, and only crying when she thought she was alone.
As he drove, he tried to break through the painful memories. He tried to remember Danny’s smile and laugh instead of his tears. He tried to think of Danny playing in the gravel driveway, making rivers out of rainwater. He tried to remember his birthday, six candles on a pineapple upside-down cake. He and Deb had given him his very own calf that year, and Danny had named the calf John. He chuckled as he remembered when Danny told him the calf’s name, and the look he and Deb had exchanged. Who named an Angus steer “John”? Danny did. He thought about how much Danny had loved that calf for the three months that it had been his. He didn’t allow himself to think about what happened three months after that birthday party.
When he got to town, the heavy clouds had finally broken, and the sun was shining. He made his way past the laundromat where their soiled clothes went during calving season, the cafe with the best hash browns in the county, and their little white church. The maples in the churchyard were glowing orange.
The co-op was on the far side of town, and the blue New Holland tractor was coming around from the back when he pulled up, the front heavy with a tote of grain. He raised his hand to the driver in greeting as he stepped out of the truck, the door slamming behind him. The breeze was cool as he walked up the path; the dust from freshly milled grain filled the air. He noticed new plants in the pots on the porch: mums. He’d overheard someone at church say that Meghan at the greenhouse had been getting a truck of mums in over the weekend.
The store was quiet, as always. The old vending machine rattled in the corner, the same one he would stop at with the kids to get twenty-five cent Dr. Peppers. The drinks were fifty cents now, but it was still the cheapest vending machine he had seen in twenty some years.
He walked up to the counter and rested his hand on the rough wood, startling Shirley behind the counter. She set down her Reader’s Digest and steadied the mug of coffee that had sloshed when she jolted in surprise.
“Any parts come in yet today?” he asked her. “They weren’t supposed to be in until this afternoon, but I thought I’d check.”
“Let me check with Abel in the back,” she said, pushing out of her chair.
His eyes wandered around the store, and once again he began to think of Danny. He wondered what Danny would be like now, as a man. He wondered if he would still love animals, if he would have become a vet like he always wanted. He wondered if he would be married. If he’d have kids of his own.
He heard the tractor outside start up again. Only then did he realize that Shirley was standing in front of him, holding out a box.
“Are you alright?” she asked as she handed the box to him and made her way back behind the counter.
He shook his head, snapping himself back into reality. “I’m fine,” he said, digging through his pocket to get out the checkbook.
It wasn’t until he was out of town and back on the highway that he realized it had only been a half hour since he left. He wondered if he should have done something else to kill time, but he also just wanted to be home. He had hardly slept since the developer came to their door almost a month ago, offering to buy out the farm. They were doing fine financially, and he hadn’t even thought about selling before then, but he knew that some part of Deb had always wanted to leave, and the offer had brought that part of her to the surface. Still, he was too tired to kill time. He would rather go home and sit in the heavy silence left by Deb’s contempt.
Back home, the sun shone brightly through the living room windows. Deb was not in her spot on the couch though her Penny Press variety puzzle book was still open on the cushios and her mug was half full on the windowsill. He paused, taking in the scene. She never got up until she was done with her cup of coffee. He slipped out of his boots and went up the stairs as he called out her name. She wasn’t in the kitchen or in the bedroom. He was on his way to check in the laundry room when he saw that the door to the basement was open.
He made his way down the stairs, taking two at a time, as his mind began to race. What had she gone and done this time? He should have checked to see if her boots were by the door, if the keys for the Buick were gone, if her purse was on the hook. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he called her name again.
He didn’t see her in the basement, and he was almost ready to turn around and go back up the staircase when he saw an old shoebox sitting on the ground, pulled down from the metal shelf on the wall. He paused before walking over to it, wondering why he possibly would have forgotten to put it up. It was clean, too. He saw none of the dust that coated the rest of the boxes piled on the abandoned basement shelves. He leaned down to put it back up when he saw a blank page lying on the floor. He crouched down and picked it up, and when he turned it over, he froze.
He knew what it was, but he didn’t quite believe it was real. He started to wonder how much sleep someone had to lose before they started to hallucinate.
He looked up across the room, then back at the photo in his hand. It was faded and ripped in the corner. But he could still make out the face, the one that he hadn’t seen in years. The one that he thought he’d never see again. She couldn’t have—but he stopped himself. She did. Of course she did.
His mind raced. How long had she had this? He wondered what else was in the box, how many memories she had saved. How many times had she looked at them, looked at Danny, alone. Why had she done this to herself?
Then he remembered why he found the box in the first place. And now he knew where Deb was.
The nights had been getting colder and shorter, and it showed in the trees that lined his path as he made his way to the grave. Yellows and oranges were overtaking the green, and the one maple that always colored early was already red as blood. He was walking towards the very place that he had been trying to keep out of his mind for days, going to have a conversation he had been dreaming of for years, and yet he couldn’t think about anything other than the photo—the photo. He clutched it so tightly that he thought it might crumble in his hand, but he couldn’t loosen his grip. He hadn’t seen that face for nearly forty years, yet to this day it remained the first thing he saw when he closed his eyes, the face in the corner of the crowd, the face that he saw in the clouds. And now, finally, he held it in his hands.
He knew she was there, but when he finally saw her, the faded blue of her jacket standing out against the browning grass, his heart still quickened. She was sitting on the ground in front of the grave, slightly to the left. The same place she had stood when they buried him, and the same place she sat the other times they had visited together—although he could count that number on one hand.
He slowly approached her, and he saw her shift when she heard his heavy footfalls coming up behind her. He didn’t touch her or say a word. She knew he was here. He waited for her.
She looked up at him, tears quietly streaming down her face. “Our son now, too,” she said, “Our son always.”
“I called them back,” she said, looking up and meeting his eyes. “I told them we weren’t going to sell.”
He fell onto his knees next to her, wrapping his arms around her like he had done so many times before.
Her head fell back to his chest, knowing he was there, and he caught her, resting his chin on her itchy wool hat.